In twelve months, Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed 483,200 people from the United States.
That is the most deportations in the agency’s history.
It is also, give or take a few thousand, what the Biden administration did in three full years combined. Fiscal years 2022, 2023 and 2024 together produced 486,000 deportations.
The Department of Homeland Security released the numbers Thursday. The fiscal year closed Sept. 30, and it closed with two records, not one. ICE made more than 491,000 arrests, nearly 475,000 of them administrative.
The previous record, 442,640 deportations, was set in fiscal 2025. It lasted one year.
Set the figures side by side and the picture gets plain. This year’s total ran about 18 percent above the 409,849 removals of fiscal 2012, under President Obama, and nearly 78 percent above the 271,484 of fiscal 2024, the last full year under President Biden.
The summer built on itself. ICE arrested 43,900 people in June, a monthly record. July topped it at 50,208. August topped July at 50,925. Then came September, with more than 48,000 arrests and roughly 44,000 removals, the strongest September for arrests ICE has ever had.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin didn’t hide his pride.
“I couldn’t be prouder of the brave men and women of ICE, who just broke more historic records,” he said.
Among those deported was Soili Xiomara Aparicio-Santos, a Honduran national convicted of trying to murder her newborn son in New York. Another was Raul Genesis Ortiz Moran, a Mexican national charged with second-degree murder and aggravated sexual assault in the death of a 2-year-old girl in Virginia.
Not everyone reads the year the same way. The nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute estimates that roughly one in five of about 980,000 deportations by ICE and Customs and Border Protection between January 2025 and July 2026 involved a person with a criminal conviction.
DHS answers that many deportees without U.S. records had committed crimes abroad.
That argument will go on. But for a long time, the complaint many Americans had about immigration law wasn’t that it was too harsh. It was that it was ornamental. Written down, debated on cable, and carried out only now and then.
Whatever else fiscal 2026 was, it wasn’t that.
The law said one thing. For years, Washington did another. This year, the two finally met.
